Shadowman
by Kyooki no Tenshi
Summary: If you don’t have anything to take away, what can really harm you? Akio knows.


_   
Disclaimer: This series and the characters contained within it are not mine. I never said they were. They're owned by Saito Chiho-san, and Be-Papas, and lots of other people to whom I'm massively grateful for bringing Utena into my life. Again, these characters are NOT mine. If you think they somehow are, you're even crazier than I am. _

_And of course, spoliers are all over the place in here.   
_

* * *

**Shadowman**

  
Sometimes his night practices were the only things that kept him sane. 

For whatever reason, the mist tonight was unusually beautiful. Shimmering harshly, his katana sliced the moon-drenched clouds apart and sent sparkling droplets swirling off into the trees outside the glade. The contrasts in the harsh night forest created a fearscape of black forest and opalescent mist while he practiced. 

He found comfort in the forms and fluid movement, lulling himself into a state of calm that kept the pain and fury of his other life at bay. He loved his night practices, and the detachment that kept him from losing his hold when the sun beat down on his head and the shadows left him alone in the heat that made him confused and blundering. At night, alone, he loathed his day self- the idiot who could never do anything right and never resisted manipulation. After sunset he knew what they thought of him and how they mocked him, and he hated them all for it; but a flash of bright color, a painfully beautiful burst of light made flesh in smiling lips and he lost himself to it. So he kept to dusk and gloom until he could learn to bear the light, only leaving his safety when he had to- for Touga, for the Setokai, for Anthy. Shadows were comforting- the dim slanting stripes in the dojo, the knife edges of the leaves at midnight, the dusky lines shading soft, unexpected curves that smelled of roses. Shadows meant safety. 

She shone worse- and of course, better- than the sun ever did, drawing him to her dangerous garden like a moth to a candle flame. There where everything shone and blazed out at him, where she could do whatever she wished with him. She drove him to hit her, he knew- he loathed every action against her even as he committed it- seeing that flash in her eyes when she faced him again, that small glint of satisfaction. She liked the simplicity of the pain and his misplaced affections; a far cry from her usual interaction, where every word was weighted. He knew that no one would understand, not if he didn't, but all he ever did was her will. Why else did he take her to the murky equipment room for their exchanges if not for the buffer it provided against her shine? The irony of it- the prize dominating the winner, and not even with any effort on her part. 

The two of them, now, together shining brighter than they ever did separately. Tenjou doing everything so effortlessly and thoughtlessly, not realizing her very nature, peripherally destructive. Anthy, no longer his Anthy, so serene and subtle beside her exuberant victor, cold in comparison but no less brilliant. The sun and the morning star, those two, linked so obviously. He couldn't be around them anymore- it hurt too much to stay within their dizzying sphere of influence where Miki and Juri and, finally, even Touga had been drawn. That girl… that eccentric, covert instrument of his downfall from the niche he'd so carefully carved for himself, where he finally felt he was becoming whole again after being torn in half... that vivid consumer of all that he had been- and he couldn't hate her. Even if she'd taken the one thing he had, he couldn't hate her, no matter how much he wanted to. 

He was too weak to hate her and too weak to defeat her, even after all his preparation and raging and devotion. Saionji Kyouichi as he had been was not enough. So he tried to change- the "normal" life offered by Shinohara-san was something good, something he, under different forces, would have sought and cherished. Her light never scorched- she sparkled gently for him, a familiar and comforting light in warm autumn afternoon colors. But he couldn't stay, as much as it hurt him to leave it, to leave her. Ohtori called him with every breath, and its inhabitants taunted him like ghosts at the edges of his vision. What he might have wanted came second to what he needed here. 

The kata came instinctively while he thought, his muscles remembering the patterns from years of repetition. He loved this, too- this constant endless improvement of himself. He always strove to make himself better, after all. To make himself into someone that would be right. Step, swing, turn, pull. Comfort in the movement and in the shadows. 

He followed the path his sword traced, imagining skin glowing where the moon filled the air and crimson streaks whirling as they had so many times before in the waking life. He never questioned that, at least; the one stable thing in his mind was that Touga would never change. The constant of the Setokaichou was his cornerstone at times- Touga always would be Touga, and always would be there, in all his suave, ruby-tipped splendor. Fighting, laughing, sniping- they had always played tag, figuratively or literally, together. Touga slipping always just out of reach with that unearthly grace he'd possessed as long as Saoinji had known him, and he helpless with laughter, scrambling to catch up and finally tackle the boy with the heartbreaking, secretive smile. His eyes stung- the mist must be making him sweat more than usual- and he shook his head at the end of the final swing to clear his vision. He stood, calm, strong, firm in the moment. He was, for the moment, total. 

Pity. 

"Excellent." He spun, katana at the ready to face this interloper in his world. His eyes skimmed the depths of the surrounding forest, unerringly moving straight to the splash of scarlet that glided forward between two pale birch twins. Heart jumping in his chest for a bare instant before he realized that it was the wrong height, he lowered his sword and faced his Rijichou. Under a splash of silver-lavender, a mouth that seemed to be carnality embodied curved thinly and the smoky purr slipped across to him. "Why did you stop?" 

He scowled with ease, as practiced in this as in his kendo. "The pattern has run its course, Ohtori-san. I'm done." He walked back to where he'd set the sheath and busied himself with the task of collecting his belongings, pointedly ignoring the man at the edge of the clearing- _his_ clearing. Chuckles tickled the hair on the back of his neck. 

"Indeed, finished. You certainly are," came the murmur, and then a smug smile bled through his words. "Mou, Saionji-kun, why so selfish? Don't you know that this is my time too?" He turned to glare as Akio laughed, throwing his arms wide, seeming to drink in the tiny points of starlight breaking through the branches above. "I am the true Morningstar, after all." 

He started slightly at the title and instantly cursed himself for it, hoping against hope that it was an accident, that his slip hadn't been noticed. 

Hope was an illusion. He really ought to have remembered that particular lesson. 

"Too close to home, Saionji-san?" Mocking him. Again, the way it always went. However he guessed, however he managed to violate minds, he _knew_. Even here, even on safe and familiar ground, he couldn't defend himself against any of them. Shame flared through him, the muscles in his brow and neck tightening as he struggled to control his emotions better this time, this time… 

"So, you've finally returned to us." Conversational tone, as if over lunch or after a slow council meeting. "We were beginning to worry about you, my friend." 

His turn to laugh, bitterly. He tossed his hair in an echo of his old arrogance. It felt stale, though. "What is it with you two and that word? Terribly presumptuous of you both, truly- if I'm not _his _friend, then I'm hardly yours." 

Tiny noises behind him telegraphed the approach, and he steeled himself for the blow he most certainly deserved for his insolence. "You are courageous, kendo captain. To speak so boldly to me- not even Kiryuu-kun would dare such a thing. It's… dangerous. But then, I'm sure you know that." 

His instincts were flashing red, telling him that the other man was far too close, but he couldn't move and insult him again. He gritted his teeth and tried to keep his tone level. "Risk means that there is potential loss, and I have nothing to lose anymore. But then, I'm sure you know that. Sir." 

"Oh?" Neutrality clouded his voice and Saionji couldn't tell anymore what was meant and what was said. He stared blankly at the mist that was thickening in the clearing as he tried to focus on the conversation. 

"Not even him?" Not a muscle moved in his entire frame, so strong was his determination not to be defeated, and still there was that rolling, cloudy laugh vibrating next to his ear and across his shoulder blades. 

"He's with one of his toys tonight, but that's nothing new. He hardly lacks for willing bedmates, after all." 

And still he didn't move, kept control of his pain and humiliation and need to lash at the source, and his dean slid away from him and into the water-shrouded open space of the glade. The mist swirled around his knees, made him seem to float, flaunted his wrenching beauty in concealment. Teasing, twisting, he danced across this cloud he'd summoned for just such a purpose, raking his long nails across his chest in pure luscious challenge. 

"Beneath him the proudest souls crumble for a smile and a caress, ne?" 

He didn't move. Couldn't move, rooted by moonlight and a single flow of parting silk across an empty space. By vibrating, liquid words and emerald shards shot from under ebony fringe. Naked terror and pure, exquisite need warred for dominance among floating crystal droplets. 

"What power, to be so beloved. Mmmm… what it must be like to be so beautiful, so gifted. He does make it all look easy, doesn't he?" He arched back, eyes half closed and glinting, graceful fingers tumbling that waterfall in perfect shining disarray across cinnamon touched with mahogany. 

"For him, it is, though. I know what he is, what he's made of under the alabaster skin. I created him, in all his beauty and his power." His voice slipped thorough Saionji's mind, slithering through his thoughts. It glowed when it wrapped around his confusion and he could swear the bastard sighed with contentment. 

"That body you love so much- I have had that perfect body shuddering at my touch." A single finger pulled across a jawline. "Mine was the hand that shaped his deepest self." Siamese sinuousness curving down and around, evading the fog that tried in vain to just touch him for the barest second. "He stares at me with eyes that you've so often thought to be like thunderclouds on the ocean or smoke under blue lights," cutting across levels and defenses and resolutions, "…and he is _mine_." 

Now the dance was slower, closer, centering itself in his field of stunned vision, winding about him but never touching while the demon hissing continued in his mind. "You've loved him and challenged him and sought him for so long… so very long… and the best, the most delicious part is that he knows all about it. He's known all along." What was the whisper and what was his own? He couldn't tell anymore. "You would do anything for him. You don't have any of your heart left for yourself." 

How he wanted to scream, to strike the creature that was making these lies. He wanted to dive for his sword and use it to hold this slithering thing away from him until the whole scene faded and he woke up in his own bed, the mist nothing more than his cold sweat. But what Abraxas willed was reality here, and so not a sound escaped him. In the back of his skull he could hear a child's laughter at his struggles. 

Akio drank it in, pleased, and caressed his cheek softly, a whisper of contact barely realized. "But he doesn't want you. He doesn't care about you." 

"Stop this," Saionji whispered, trying to turn away once again. His cheekbone pressed painfully against the bark of a tree that he didn't remember backing into and he clenched his eyes tight shut to keep from shaming himself even more. "Leave…" 

He didn't listen, of course. "He never cared about you. And you know that, don't you, Kyouichi?" Warm breath slid across his eyelid, stirring the wetness gathered there. A soft hand brushed the damp strands that had escaped from his ponytail away from his neck. "You know he loves her." And the mist was surging around him in thick, almost solid eddying swirls, sliding across his bare chest and brushing his skin through his clothing. His hair lifted heavily, pulled slightly. "You know that even without her, he'll never come back to you." A cold, sharp oval pressed into the muscles of his neck, tracing too gently to hurt and too slowly to ignore, and warm water condensed on his lips like a blanket. He couldn't breathe like this, his mouth opening in a small gasp while the fingers in his hair moved languorously against his scalp. 

"So beautiful, bound up like this. You should do so more often." With a small snap the tie broke and tumbling forest green filled his vision, obscuring what small view of the other man he had in periphery. Warm rivulets trickled along the hollows of his neck and chest, and all he could see now was gray, soft, gentle, formless gray. 

Without knowing how he got there, without wondering why, he felt blades of dew-soaked grass on his back. "You will never have him," Akio crooned into his ear, hair slipping over one shoulder and trailing across his collarbone. The droplets on his mouth disappeared one by one, each vanishing in a tiny brush of moist heat. Upper lip, lower, then a burning path from jaw to juglar, taking coolness and thought as it went. Pain, sweet and shining, where skin broke and feather lips sucked his life away, replaced it with hazy bliss. "He will never take you in substitute." 

Now stinging trails from the corners of his eyes into his already dripping hair, salt paths burning the skin and a marble cold pressure soothing them, stroking them. Silken skin slid past his while he gasped and turned his head senselessly this way and that, not daring to open his eyes. Velvet rasping across a nipple without warning dissolved his spine into a sea of electric flashes. "I know what he is, under that alabaster skin I carved and crowned with my blood." Hard and unbearably flawless, angles and throbbing, alive flesh pressed against him from behind mist-chilled skin. "He is Mine. And bound to him..." Arching, arching, need and demand swallowing even awareness as heat, no, n-no, he was defenseless against heat, please, _please_, "…you belong only to me." 

He fisted his hands roughly in waterfalls that he was distantly amazed to be able to touch, groping through the moonlight blindly until he could feel skeins of it, and dragged him up to kiss that mouth, that poisonous, succulent mouth, desperately. If it was death to taste this, then let him die while the pain was, for once, muffled in pleasure and the delicious relief of whimpers. 

Underneath the acidic whispers shredding him apart, he moaned into a silver grin. A tongue pressed hungrily into his own, pulsing and pushing and sliding silkily across his flesh. The whispers continued, no longer even bothering to maintain the pretense of speaking. "You don't understand, Kyouichi. You are parts of my whole, all of you. Without me you do not exist, fragmented into your separate persons and trying to delude yourselves into thinking that you are what was meant to be." His body vanishing, effervescent, unless it was touched somewhere, icy become scorching, nowhere safe. 

"He is always with me," he hissed as he settled himself above on his hands. Moving his hips, just tiny bits, increments of motion "In me. As me." Hard shove now, spasm of wonderful nerve signals, again, again, faster and too much but there was no stopping it and it hurt so badly... "He is but a piece of what I can be, and you, my poor, misguided passion," above him, magnificent, rearing, shining impossibly intense pinpoints across his flesh and within it while he bit down convulsively on the fingers invading his mouth and the pain made sharp satisfied gasps cut through the merging mist and hair, "…have been denying us completion for far too long." 

Bursts of crimson-salmon across his eyelids as he gave his last increment of his soul to his lord and saw in an instant- exploding throughout his body came Touga; his essence, his laughter and taste and scent, flame and silk and oh, such painful beauty searing his thoughts while he arched and thrashed and sobbed against that sparkling human form above him. Arms open in his mind, whispering in Akio's voice that now he had his true bride- and lie or not, something in him splintered apart. 

He smiled. 

Touga's arms were warm and strong, they were so real and he was so very tired. Hands were stroking his cheek and hair, smoothing his tears away. He buried his face in the junction between neck and shoulder and clung tightly to the broad chest, feeling safer than he ever had in his entire life. It didn't matter any more that it was a lie or that somewhere far away he could still feel Akio within him and the throbbing ecstasy that accompanied it. He didn't care. He didn't care anymore. 

Akio smiled through black murk as he shifted away, back through the trees with the retreating mist and leaving Saionji's unconscious body damp where it lay. 

Away, through a rose cut panel of stained glass, where a snowy uniform was tinted ruddy by the light of the academy dance within. The president of the Student Council opened his eyes languorously. Blankly looked down at the blood dripping from his index finger and a jagged edge of steel in the window frame. Came back to himself. Tightened his jaw and walked out of the light to his waiting tasks, almost welcoming this awareness of events gifted him for the night. A man with a broken heart was a more dangerous opponent, after all. Dead men win battles. Love is a lie. And the bitter-ashes taste in his mouth was from the hors d'oeuvres, nothing more. 

Nothing more. 

_If you don't have anything to take away, what can really harm you, Saionji-kun?_   
  


  



End file.
